After visiting Lucas's Skywalker Ranch theater seven years ago, home theater installer Johann Peters decided to pick and choose some of its best ideas for his own theater, spending $100,000 to build a 16-seat demo theater with a dozen speakers, 12,740 watts of amplification, a high-end JVC 1080p projector and even a mixing console. More…

Friday, April 27, 2007

Do you remember the launch of the compact disc, which was 20 years after the cassette? Digital audio has emerged because of its usefulness in the recording, manipulation, mass-production and distribution of sound. Modern distribution of music across the internet through on-line stores has seriously cut into the sale of CDs. How long before the compact disc becomes obsolete? Your comments are appreciated.

This piece is called "Uokahd" or tapelake. The surface of the sculpture is comprised of 64 sq feet of audiocassette tape that is "read" by a walkman tape head mounted to the underside of a radio control rock playback module.

Composers have always drawn inspiration from mathematical ideas and 21st century composers make extensive use of mathematical tools in their work. More interesting, though, are the similarities in musical and mathematical thinking. Mathematicians and composers make use of many of the same metaphors as tools for nonverbal reasoning, communication, discovery, and creation.

The Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) announces its 13th annual summer session. The course will take place from Monday, July 2nd - Friday, July 27th, in Romainville (Paris), France. Faculty will include: Trevor Wishart, Agostino de Scipio, Michael Kinney, Sharon Kanach, Pip Chordorov and Gerard Pape. One-on-one Max/MSP tutorials with Stefan Tiedje. Individual studio work is at the heart of this program. As part of the 2007 Summer Intensive CCMIX offers seminars and studio sessions devoted to the issues of 'sound and image' in the work of Xenakis as well as in the broader area of 'visual music'.

Consider a creative experience in Paris this summer. More information is available by email from Randall Neal, Admissions Director.

Monday, April 23, 2007

The Making of Star Wars by J. W. Rinzler comes out April 24 in both a hardcover ($75) and trade paperback version. The foreword by Peter Jackson chronicles how the future Lord of the Rings director was immediately encouraged by the original Star Wars to pick up a camera and start filming.

La légende d'Eer is a powerful 7-channel electro-acoustic composition which Xenakis created in 1977-78 to be played in "Le Diatope", a curvaceous architectural construction designed by the composer, together with a visual component including laser lights. This "multi-media" work was composed for the opening of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where it was performed for three months and seen by thousands of people.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

John Cage / Morton Feldman: Radio Happenings I - VRecorded at WBAI, New York City, July 1966 - January 1967

John Cage and Morton Feldman recorded four open-ended conversations at the studios of radio station WBAI in New York. These meetings spanned six months between July 1966 and January 1967, and were produced as five "Radio Happenings". Both were at transitional points in their music. Cage had completed Variations V in 1965 and Variations VI and VII in 1966, and would publish "A Year from Monday" in 1967. Most of Feldman's important work was yet to come. These conversations between two old friends, relaxed, smoking, and throwing out ideas, are full of laughter and long ponderous silences. They form an incredible historical record of their concerns and preoccupations with making music, art, society, and politics of the moment.

Listen to Charles Amirkhanians interview with the legendary mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, which was recorded informally in her home in Milan. With birdsongs, traffic noise, and the arrival of a telegram from Luciano Berio in the background, the singer talks about her theory of the New Vocality, her approach to recitals, her upbringing and musical training, her experience working with Igor Stravinsky, and many other topics Enjoy musical exampes including excerpts from Circles, Visage, and Folksongs by Berio, Aria with Fontana Mix by John Cage, and Baroque arrangements of "Yellow Submarine", Help, Yesterday, and Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles.

Randy Thom has been part of Robert Zemeckis' core creative team ever since Forrest Gump (1994). Through his career Thom has worked with such top Hollywood talents as Walter Murch, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg. Thom has received two Academy Awards:

"My approach to the art is almost always to take something from the past and put an interesting twist on it. Young sound designers, I think, often get caught up in the idea of making a sound that's unlike anything anybody has ever heard before. But that's really hopeless. It also isn't very useful, because a sound needs a frame of reference."

To kick-off the Star Wars 30th Anniversary festivities in Europe, UAU International and Weird and Wonderful, in collaboration with Lucasfilm Ltd., present Star Wars: The Exhibition. Opening May 5 at the historic County Hall, Westminster, London through Sept. 1. This exciting event is part of the 30th Anniversary festivities being topped off by Star Wars Celebration Europe on July 13-15 at ExCel in London, England.

A radio drama is played out, first we hear the radio show, with a little boy in progress, then we see what the boy is imagining what visuals are taking place as the boy is listening. We're watching what he's imagining, then it gets really interesting as we see the radio show in progress, where the main focus is how they make radio sound effects.

Since joining Dolby Laboratories in 1969, Ioan Allen (Senior Vice President) has been directly involved in the origination and development of all the major audio advancements emanating from the Dolby film program. During his tenure at the company, Mr. Allen has spearheaded the introduction of many of Dolby's breakthrough audio formats-from Dolby Stereo in 1974 to Dolby SR in 1986 and Dolby Digital in 1992—each representing another step forward in the company's successful transition from analog audio pioneer to digital entertainment leader.[learn more @ dolby.com]

Pe Lang and Zimoun start their joint project Untitled Sound Objects, based on work with materials brought to sound through vibration. They focus on creating acoustic architecture with an organic feel, investigating properties of sound, materials, resonance properties and generative systems.

Vibrating motors cause glass plates, on which various materials are placed, to oscillate. The vibrations move the materials and the frictions caused by this generate sounds, which are amplified via contact microphones and edited through DSP (Digital Signal Processing). Through a multiple channel speaker system amplified sounds are projected and reassembled into new sound architectures. The software used to control the vibrating motors and the sound editing is programmed with MAX MSP.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

CNMAT is a music research, composition, teaching, recording and performance facility located in the hills just north of the UC Berkeley campus. They promote, produce and present the creative interaction between music and technology.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Iannis Xenakis (1922—2001) is one of the most important composers of the 20th century. His works span every media and numerous approaches, electronic and acoustical, from orchestral to “musique concrete”. Also a mathematician, experimental engineer and architect, he is a true cult figure.This compilation is a collection of musical dedications to Iannis Xenakis, realized as the exclusive compositions by the respective authors.

Walter Murch in conversation at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2003. The lecture gives an insight behind the scenes to showcase the work of this master of film and sound editing describing not only the techniques used in his craft, but also the creative inspiration behind in the choices he made in the editing room. Murch also notes that film editing is now 100 years old, and recounts achievements from the history of the craft.[google video]

Marino Zuccheri was the sound engineer of the famous Milan RAI (Italian Broadcasting Company) Electronic Music Studio, and he worked with Berio, Nono, Maderna, Cage, Pousseur among the others, and he gave birth to some of the great masterpieces of early electronica. He was the one who actually knew how to operate the equipment.[Listen to an excerpt from 'Parete 1967', via die-schachtel]

Friday, April 13, 2007

Fifty years ago, in 1957, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Max Mathews demonstrated that the digital computer can be used as a fantastic new music instrument. He created a revolutionary software platform destined to form the basis of all contemporary digital musical systems (Music 1--Music 5).

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Luxo Jr. is the first film produced in 1986 by Pixar Animation Studios. It is a computer-animated short film, demonstrating the kind of things the newly-established company was capable of producing. Luxo Jr. later served as the mascot for Pixar Animation Studios, appearing in its production logo. These clips are parody of this famous opening title to all Pixar films.[via Upcoming Pixar]

This is a video showing how fun it is to became a Jedi :-)Matteo Milani (U.S.O. Project) controls Symbolic Sound Kyma with the bluetooth Nintendo WiiMote (via OSCulator application for Mac OS X, running in background).To do this you need: a Symbolic Sound Kyma system (version X.44), the Nintendo Wii remote control (without the full console) and OSCulator 2.0 by Camille Troillard.The Sound is generated from Kyma with Granular Synthesis for the humming, custom samples triggering for the impacts, plus noise filtering and doppler for the whoosh effects.

Manipulating sound until it seemed to be something that existed in real space. This refers to playing back existing recordings through a speaker or speakers in real-world acoustic situations, and recording that playback with microphones so that the new recording takes on the acoustic characteristics of the place it was "re-recorded."

Monday, April 09, 2007

The School of Sound presents a stimulating and provocative series of masterclasses by practitioners, artists and academics on the creative use of sound with image. Directors, sound designers, composers, editors and theorists working at the highest levels of art and media reveal the methods, theories and creative thinking that lie behind the most effective uses of sound and music.

In its previous editions, the School of Sound has attracted delegates from over 25 countries. Speakers for 2007 include:

"I spent a lot of time trying to discover those key sounds that bring universes along with them. I tend not to visualize but auralize, to think about sound in terms of space. Rather than listen to the sound itself, I listen to the space in which the sound is contained."

Thursday, April 05, 2007

“We're cultivating methodologies for an A/V institute of experiential engineering,” says Recombinant Media Labs founder and conductor Naut Humon. Lofty words to be sure, yet this is an entirely fitting description of the work happening in this San Francisco audio/visual production and research facility.

One of the most critical, yet underappreciated links of the film sound chain is Foley recording. Foley sound effects are sounds that synchronize on screen, and require the expertise of a foley artist to properly record. Footsteps, the movement of hand props, and the rustling of cloth are common foley units.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Monday, April 02, 2007

"The goal of producing a THX trailer is to create something that lets the audience experience the capacity of the sound system without being overwhelming … In fact, from a technical standpoint, 'Deep Note' just feels loud because it has a spectrum of frequencies that grows from small to large."

In 2006, Nintendo introduced a game console called the Wii that comes with a motion-sensitive wireless Bluetooth controller called the Wiimote. CamilleTroillard has added an extension to his Open Sound Control translation software, OSCulator, enabling Macintosh users to receive acceleration information transmitted from the Wiimote, translated to OSC messages, and sent to Kyma where they can be used as live parameter controllers.OSCulator is able to be used with many hardware devices and software, thanks to the OSC protocol. And using OSCulator, the Lemur can talk directly to the Kyma sound design workstation using higher bandwidth and higher resolution than MIDI controls ... with great ease of use.

2004 - Ten years after the OSCAR (Best Sound/Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing) for JURASSIC PARK, Gary Rydstrom discussed the dramatic purpose and the processes he used to create the unique aural effects, giving a clear and rare demonstration of the craft of motion picture sound.